The Talmud on Trump’s Trials

Plus, Wall Street Journal misleads on Gaza famine; and more

President Trump has a date in New York on Friday before Judge Juan Merchan. Trump may be tempted to show up and thank Merchan and the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, for helping him win the 2024 presidential election by rendering him, to some voters, a sympathetic figure. In Israel, meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu is facing his own prolonged trial.

It turns out, though, that the question of whether a political leader can be subject to a court’s discipline is one that has been debated for a very long time. I’ve been working my way through the Talmud on a page-a-day “Daf Yomi” cycle since January 2020. This week, in a remarkable coincidence of timing given the Trump court date, the Talmud tackles this topic, with a dramatic story involving the Angel Gabriel, the court known as the Sanhedrin, and King Alexander Yannai, who was the King of Judea from 103 BCE to 76 BCE.

Here’s the relevant passage, from the tractate Sandhedrin pages 19a and 19b, courtesy of Sefaria’s William Davidson Talmud via the Koren publisher and the scholar Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz:

The mishna teaches: A king does not judge and is not judged. Rav Yosef says: They taught this halakha only with regard to the kings of Israel, who were violent and disobedient of Torah laws, but with regard to the kings of the house of David, the king judges and is judged, as it is written: “O house of David, so says the Lord: Execute justice in the morning” (Jeremiah 21:12). If they do not judge him, how can he judge? But isn’t it written: “Gather yourselves together, yea, gather together [hitkosheshu vakoshu]” (Zephaniah 2:1), and Reish Lakish says: This verse teaches a moral principle: Adorn [kashet] yourself first, and then adorn others, i.e., one who is not subject to judgment may not judge others. Since it is understood from the verse in Jeremiah that kings from the Davidic dynasty can judge others, it is implicit that they can also be judged.

The Gemara asks: But what is the reason that others do not judge the kings of Israel? It is because of an incident that happened, as the slave of Yannai the king killed a person. Shimon ben Shataḥ said to the Sages: Put your eyes on him and let us judge him. They sent word to Yannai: Your slave killed a person. Yannai sent the slave to them. They sent word to Yannai: You also come here, as the verse states with regard to an ox that gored a person to death: “He should be testified against with his owner” (Exodus 21:29). The Torah stated: The owner of the ox should come and stand over his ox.

The Gemara continues to narrate the incident: Yannai came and sat down. Shimon ben Shataḥ said to him: Yannai the king, stand on your feet and witnesses will testify against you. And it is not before us that you are standing, to give us honor, but it is before the One Who spoke and the world came into being that you are standing, as it is stated: “Then both the people, between whom the controversy is, shall stand before the Lord, before the priests and the judges that shall be in those days” (Deuteronomy 19:17). Yannai the king said to him: I will not stand when you alone say this to me, but according to what your colleagues say, and if the whole court tells me, I will stand.

Shimon ben Shataḥ turned to his right. The judges forced their faces to the ground out of fear and said nothing. He turned to his left, and they forced their faces to the ground and said nothing. Shimon ben Shataḥ said to them: You are masters of thoughts, enjoying your private thoughts, and not speaking. May the Master of thoughts, God, come and punish you. Immediately, the angel Gabriel came and struck those judges to the ground, and they died. At that moment, when they saw that the Sanhedrin does not have power to force the king to heed its instructions, the Sages said: A king does not judge others and others do not judge him, and he does not testify and others do not testify concerning him, due to the danger of the matter.

Trump is of course a president, not a king. America operates under laws other than those of the Talmud, though Jewish law has been cited at times in judicial opinions. The slavery reference is jarring to modern readers. And it’s been some time since Angel Gabriel was cited in a New York City courtroom.

My printed Koren Talmud includes a note that sums up the relevant Jewish law, citing Maimonides. It says some kings, the Davidic ones, are subject to court proceedings and others, the kings of Israel, aren’t: “The kings of the Davidic dynasty may judge others and are judged, and testimony can be provided in court about them. Since the kings of Israel were known to be disobedient of the court and potentially dangerous if provoked, the Sages decreed that they were not to judge or be judged, and that testimony was not to be provided about them.”

Which kingly category, if either of them, Trump or Netanyahu would properly fall into is up for discussion. But it’d be a discussion conducted with more humility if it came with the knowledge that it’s a longstanding debate, and with the understanding that keeping a leader out of court need not be evidence of a leader’s perfection, but rather may be an accommodation made to the leader’s imperfection.

Yesterday’s news: “Harvard Faculty Doctors Demand Release of Suspected Hamas Terrorist” was the headline over yesterday’s The Editors. “Speaker calls to wipe Zionism off the Earth.” The post mysteriously was emailed just to paying subscribers. If you are a free subscriber and didn’t receive it, it might be a sign that it’s finally time to become a paying customer so that you can get full access to all the content.

Today’s news: The latest example of The Editors Rule of Byline Inflation, which is that the reliability of any news article is inversely proportional to the number of reporters who have a byline on it, comes from the Wall Street Journal, which offers named credit to four journalists—Jared Malsin, Nancy Youssef, Carrie Keller-Lynn, and Summer Said—on an 18-paragraph follow-up to a development first reported by Axios. True to the rule, the four journalists can’t get the story straight.

The Journal reports, “The war, which has largely been carried out with U.S.-made weapons, has reduced much of the coastal enclave to ruins while thousands of people have also struggled with famine-like conditions in the territory, according to Palestinian health officials and a United Nations-backed hunger-monitoring mechanism.”

It’s simply inaccurate that the war “has largely been carried out with U.S.-made weapons.” The Associated Press has reported that Hamas is using “Iranian sniper rifles. AK-47 assault rifles from China and Russia. North Korean- and Bulgarian-built rocket-propelled grenades. Anti-tank rockets secretly cobbled together in Gaza.” And Israel is fighting not only with American weapons but with plenty of Israeli-made weapons.

As for the “famine-like conditions,” the Journal misleads readers. “Plenty of Food Aid Is Getting to Gaza,” the Journal’s own opinion pages have assured readers. At the U.N. in September 2024, Prime Minister Netanyahu called the claim that Israel is starving Gazans “an absurdity,” and an example of “moral confusion.” Said Netanyahu: “We help bring in 700,000 tons of food into Gaza. That’s more than 3,000 calories a day for every man, woman, and child in Gaza.” Even the Biden administration’s American ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, called a December 2024 report from that hunger monitoring mechanism “outdated and inaccurate,” saying the report overestimated tenfold the population in a section of Gaza. “At a time when inaccurate information is causing confusion and accusations, it is irresponsible to issue a report like this,” Lew said.

Readers of the Journal news article would come away thinking Israel is using American arms to starve Gazans. That’s false, as the Journal op-ed article, Netanyahu, and Ambassador Lew have all pointed out. The “Palestinian health officials” are Hamas, a terrorist group dedicated to defaming Israel and destroying it. Hamas has also been looting the aid shipments and profiting from them. Hamas has even, according to Israeli reserve general Amir Avivi, been threatening to withhold food from Gazan families unless those families supply 16-year-old and 17-year-old children as anti-Israel fighters in Gaza. Where is the skepticism from the Journal reporters? Where are the editors at the Journal who should be policing this sort of nonsense?

What China Wants: Michael Mandelbaum has a new piece on what China wants, that is, what it intends to do with its expanded military. He concludes: “It is possible that today’s Chinese government has no specific purpose in mind for its armed forces other than the capture of Taiwan….If, however, Beijing should succeed in bringing Taiwan under its control, it would immediately confront the question of what else it might wish to do with the military that it has built. In that case, having exercised its power effectively, having humiliated the United States and perhaps even expelled American forces from the Asia-Pacific region, a victorious China’s global horizons would surely expand. Its appetite would grow with the eating.”

Recent work: “If You Subsidize Failure, You’ll Get More of It,” is the headline The Wall Street Journal put over a letter to the editor I sent that it published recently. It has to do with education funding in Massachusetts and in general: “Too often, government rewards poor performance with increased funding.”

Tax Foundation on state migration: The Tax Foundation has data from the Census Bureau, U-Haul, and United Van Lines on what states Americans are migrating from and to. There are some variations in the three sets of data but there is a lot of similarity, too—a substantial part of the story is that people are moving to low-tax states from high-tax states. And its not all a story about the warm weather, either, because New Hampshire is also gaining and Hawaii is losing.

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